Shi Zhi and Chinese Literary Modernism in the Late Twentieth Century: Modernity, Consumerist Economics, and Chinese Modernist Poetry

Abstract

Shi Zhi and Chinese Literary Modernism in the Late Twentieth Century: Modernity, Consumerist Economics, and Chinese Modernist Poetry Tiao Wang (bio) and Ronald Schleifer (bio) In this article, we argue that Western literary modernism is part of the longer history of Enlightenment modernity, originating in the seventeenth century. We suggest that it is useful to see late nineteenth-century literary modernism as what David Damrosch describes as “a literary movement arising both within and against modernity.”1 Our larger aim, as we mention in the conclusion to this article, is to attempt to begin a new definition of what and where modernism “is.” When many scholars talk about the economic “miracle” in China since “The Reform and Opening Policy” (Gai Ge Kai Fang 改革开放) beginning in 1978, they contrast that “miracle” against the economic transformation of the West since the eighteenth century. We contend that it is best contrasted with the creation of corporate capitalism between 1880 and 1930 in the West, and that in both China and the West in these comparable periods the creation of a consumer culture beyond subsistence transformed the economic, social, intellectual, and experiential lives of individuals and communities in ways that created the ethos of cultural modernism. To substantiate our argument about the Chinese participation in what we are calling the “culture of modernism,” we discuss the later poetry of Shi Zhi (b. 1948), whose work began in the 1960s, in relation to writers of Western modernism. Specifically, we examine his later work—in the 1990s and the twenty-first century—in relation to three aspects of Western modernist literary works: 1) [End Page 377] the “difficulty” of modernism in the context of the complicated organization of the vertical integration of corporate capitalism, when production integrates more or less independent manufacturing procedures and thus calls for a version of the collaborative engagements found in literary modernism; 2) the “performativity” of literary and philosophical modernism in the context of the diffusion of value, when the motive of consumption is reconfigured in an economics of desire rather than need; and 3) the impersonal “affectivity” in modernist poetics in the context of the absentee-ownership occasioned by the “artificial person” and “artificial money” of corporate capitalism. Shi Zhi, Consumerist Economics, and Modernism The choice of Shi Zhi as a representative of “Chinese modernism” in our argument is not arbitrary, especially in relation to the correlation we pursue between the Reform Policy in China in the 1980s and the second Industrial Revolution and the establishment of corporate capitalism in the West beginning in the 1880s. The great characteristic of these moments in economic and social history, as we argue, is the creation of vast reservoirs of wealth beyond need. The first Industrial Revolution, in the early nineteenth century in the West, significantly made wealth acquisition a signal motive in economic and social life, but much of that wealth was reinvested in non-consumable capital goods (e.g., factories, tools, infrastructure). In the second Industrial Revolution, wealth, in the form of non-necessary goods (goods beyond subsistence for many people) transformed the ethos and value of culture. Thus, Karl Polanyi notes that “nineteenth-century [Western] civilization alone was economic in a different and distinctive sense [from “all types of [preceding] societies”], for it chose to base itself on a motive only rarely acknowledged as valid in the history of human societies, and certainly never before raised to the level of a justification of action and behavior in everyday life, namely, gain.”2 By the time of the second Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century—and the time of the Chinese Reform Policy in the late twentieth century—wealth had run wild. In his study, provocatively entitled Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money, Maghiel van Crevel emphasizes the consumerism of this period in China. In his study, he notes that Money, then, refers to the China of the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, where, as economic whistle-blower He Qinglian writes, “the championing of money as a value” has reached unprecedented heights. This period has seen poetry keeping itself afloat in a maelstrom of consumerism, entertainment, (new) media and popular culture, as marketization, commodification, commercialization...